


Lover Come Hold Me

by RurouniHime



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Divergent Timelines, Don't copy to another site, Fix-It, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Infinity Gems, M/M, Multiverse, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Pining, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Superhusbands, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 19:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 7,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19470931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: One by one, the stones must go back.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I call it a fix-it. I realize this may be debatable to some. But I'm also remaining canon-compliant, so there's a win!
> 
> Thank you to snottygrrl for betaing!
> 
> Title is from the song _Cringe_ by Matt Maeson.

_Mind._

He starts with the Mind Stone. It was his own theft and he doesn’t want any surprises on his first go at this.

Still, he never could stomach the thought of leaving the stone in Sitwell’s hands, and though giving it to himself would have been the safest choice, he can’t do that either. He knows his past self: he’ll never believe Steve is who he says he is and the idea of explaining until the newly woken Captain America buys what’s he’s selling just makes him so tired. And uneasy; he can’t shake the feeling that it would splinter the timeline further. Not to mention, his past self is knocked out cold on the floor at the moment the stone leaves the timeline, and from what To… what Scott said, down on the ground floor, Loki has made off with the Tesseract again by now. 

In short, Steve figures there’s not much he can do to fix this timeline.

He ends up in Nick Fury’s office, using a facsimile of Fury’s fingerprint, and opens the case on top of the desk. Most of SHIELD is in Manhattan dealing with the battle’s aftermath. He doesn’t know how Pierce will rationalize the fact that Captain Hail Hydra left with the scepter in New York City only for Nick Fury to bring it out of his DC office. He doesn’t really care. 

Nick’s office is bland and unexceptional except for a bloodied stack of trading cards on the corner of the desk that makes Steve pause. Almost like this Fury expected Steve to come here, and for a moment, Steve wonders.

He wishes Phil Coulson were still alive. He could have given the scepter to him and slept easy.

There is, of all things, an orange tabby sunning itself on Nick’s rolling chair, its tail flicking lazily. Steve hadn’t thought Nick was a cat person.

He watches the timer like a hawk. As the time nears, the thud of his heart becomes unbearable. The case is quantum-shielded, courtesy of Janet Van Dyne, blocking the stones from fully incorporating into their timelines until they are removed from their respective slots. Steve has the exact instant that the stone leaves the timeline, but he has no idea what to expect. If he’s late, even by a heartbeat, will the timeline branch further? Will it snap back once he gets the stone out or will it continue along its tangent forever? Will shaky hands destroy everything they’ve worked for?

At ten seconds, something very… well, there’s really no way to describe it. The air _presses_ on his hand. Steve freezes, staring into the open case at the scapolite-yellow stone inside. The air grows denser, squeezing his fingers, his palm, tightening around his wrist like a noose. The cat gets to its feet, tail gone utterly still, eyes locked on Steve. Steve’s ears begin to ring, sharper and sharper. He reaches without thinking, nearly touches the stone. He jerks back, but it yanks at him, as though the air has thickened into paste and the stone has twisted itself around him, drawing him down.

 _Let it,_ he thinks, out of nowhere, and as the clock ticks down to one—

He does.

The whole room bends, the walls warping inward like wavering reeds, and then with a snick, the stone is free, cradled in Steve’s palm. The room is warm and still again, the sudden sound of purring filling the silence.

He blinks, and the stone is not a stone anymore, but the ball of unnatural blue that beamed out from Loki’s scepter. The light burns his eyes.

He sets it down in a hurry and shuts the case with the rest of the stones inside. There’s no sound from out in the hallway, and the sun still spills golden across the desk, the chair, the floor. Down in the bay outside, waves lap; the white triangles of sailboats skim across shimmering water. Everything _seems_ alright. 

Steve pulls the miniaturized scepter from his pocket and returns it to full size, then places the Mind Stone carefully into its cradle. Lays it on Fury’s desk and steps back.

Swears he sees the cat nod.

When he looks again, the cat has gone back to cleaning itself, purring and purring. Steve eyes it for a moment, then lets out a long breath.

One down.

~tbc~


	2. Chapter 2

_Space._

His next stop is the ‘70s. It’s a near fatal mistake.

Seeing Tony alive and well, chatting with his father—it sucks the air right out of Steve’s chest. His vision narrows into a tunnel with Tony at its end. His lungs seize; something very like an asthma attack. He grips the case’s handle, but he can’t feel it anymore. Tony is the only thing in color, the stunned look on his face as he gazes at his father, eyes wide like a child’s, the way he’s breathing, too hard, too much in the upper chest. Breathing. _Breathing,_ whole. 

Steve is two steps forward before he realizes.

A familiar laugh, albeit hoarser than he remembers—Howard Stark’s laugh—stops him in his tracks. He looks around, halfway out into the sunlight with another version of himself across the way between a Humvee and a stack of crates, almost in direct line of sight.

Steve curses, forces himself to move casually back into cover. He watches the other him for signs that he’s been seen. But the other him is watching Tony, and making a markedly poor job of subterfuge while he does it. It grinds under Steve’s skin, and suddenly he’s flashing back to another time he encountered himself, stared his reflection down across a catwalk in Stark Tower and found himself lacking.

This man— _you, you idiot, that’s you_ —isn’t trying to stop him this time, isn’t doing anything but standing, waiting, with possibly the most precious cargo he’s ever carried in the pockets of his trousers, and yet Steve’s anger builds, builds, and he can’t figure it out until it clicks abruptly home. 

One look at his counterpart’s face clinches it: the Steve before him has not admitted (to himself, to anyone) just why this mission with Tony is so vital to him. Yes, he knew it was a gift, being at Tony’s side again after everything they’d done to each other, of course he knew that, but the pall of the unacknowledged and the senseless weight that comes with it hangs all over the other Steve.

For a second, Steve hates the bastard. _Just wait,_ he thinks, the fury tasting like bile on his tongue. _It’s what you’re good at. Wait again until the final piece comes crashing down, until it’s too damned late._

It’s a waste and a risk, looking at himself. He turns to Tony instead. Tony, at whom he would rather be looking anyway. Tony, in sharply creased black. Tony, wearing glasses that had knocked the air out of Steve’s chest that first time around too, made the words itch in the back of his throat, and he doesn’t even know what he meant to say that day, but he knows it was there, struggling up toward the light. Tony, his capable fingers clenching and tapping at the briefcase handle, all the stress-energy rattling out where Howard can’t see. 

Tony, holding flowers.

Steve remembers another cluster of flowers floating away on the water. And then it’s a whole avalanche of nerves. He’ll never see the tick at the corner of Tony’s lips again, never the tappity-tap of too-idle fingers. Never the sharp squint of those eyes as they catch hold, as they focus in. Never those hands, never that mouth, never that ridiculously kempt beard, that quicksilver voice, the warmth of that cologne. He’ll never meet Tony’s eye in a room full of Avengers and share that silent, silly glee at whatever one of them just said. 

He blinks at himself again across the way, at how close this Steve was to actually giving it all voice, and his eyes cloud. This time he thinks, _Poor bastard._

Steve had had this in hand. He had, or he never would have taken the case of stones under his care. But try as he might, he can’t remember full-on grief since that impossible moment on the battlefield when he watched Tony Stark die. At least nothing that feels like this. His chest aches like someone’s clubbed it. His vision blurs further; he sucks back a sound, but it breaks from him half-realized, as shattered as the shield that Tony had once held up for him to strap back into place.

He goes, before he can’t anymore, finds his way numbly through the halls and down into a dark clutter of chairs, tables, and lockboxes. He tries to forget that above him, Tony lives and breathes, and he waits, wiping his eyes, for the air to bend.

It does, of course. He takes the Space Stone out of its housing, the atmosphere crushing in on his hand, the walls twisting, burgeoning, then whipping back into place. Once, he’d wondered what it would mean, giving back a bare stone in place of the Tesseract. 

He doesn’t much care anymore.

~tbc~


	3. Chapter 3

_Power._

Despite its inherent danger to mortal flesh, the Power Stone is a milk run, the only snag staying out of sight while Rhodey flickers away, while Nebula—

So that’s what happened. Steve watches, grim, as she twitches and gasps, held captive by her own circuitry. He longs to stop her, pull her free of her father and end it all there. Tear up Thanos’ map to victory. Maybe if Thanos hadn’t arrived when he did, if the final battle had not gone exactly the way it had—

He can’t. The gravity of such a fault suffocates, the infinite number of tragedies he could cause as each timeline splits off. It’s too dark to see it, but already he senses the air warping, as it had in Fury’s office, as it had in the bowels of SHIELD. It feels worse than before, a needling pressure against his eardrums. All he can do is crouch in the shadows with the orb at the ready and the Power Stone held in the palm of Bruce’s modified glove, the peeling, melting material keeping the stone away from his skin for the next few moments. 

All he can do is wait for Nebula to run from the citadel.

~tbc~


	4. Chapter 4

_Reality._

He gives the stone to Frigga while the palace wafts and bends around them. 

There’s something timeless about her, as with all Asgardians: monstrous in the way her hands cage the red stone, ancient as she coaxes it into a sluggish mist, tender in the way she cradles the swirling slurry close to her chest. Steve holds Rocket’s extraction rod as she guides the Aether inside.

But the palace continues to warp even after they are done, waves and shimmers that dance like candle flames. Steve eyes his surroundings with alarm. “That’s not just the stone, is it?”

She hums noncommittally, tracking the disturbance with just her eyes, and Steve’s uneasiness grows. He knows she sees it too, that she’s tracking him as much as the rest, and the way she’s looking at him—

“You are brave to undertake this.”

He can’t ignore it any longer. He’s four stones in, and with each one the bending gets more immense.

She makes another sound, this one faintly reproving. “It _is_ immense, what you are doing. But you needn’t worry. I’m glad it was you who came.”

“I should stop.” It slips out. He knows he can’t stop. He holds rigid, afraid from the way she studies him that she will agree.

“I will see it back to where it belongs,” she tells him instead, eyes fixed now on the eddying crimson light. When she looks up, she smiles, and Steve sees Thor all over her.

“Should I wait?” he asks inanely. A fight is brewing around them, the atmosphere of the palace tightening in a very different way. Steve is wholly outside this tension, and he knows what approaching war feels like. No one here knows what’s coming, except him and the woman before him. He would rather stay, strike and beat on blood and bone until his muscles rage under his skin. Battle something tangible, instead of the fruitless abstracts of time, space, thought.

She looks him down, up, _through._ “No,” with raised eyebrow, “you have waited long enough.”

She might as well be listening to his thoughts.

“Take care of my son?” she asks with another kind smile, and Steve thinks, _I can’t even do_ that _for her anymore._ He releases Thor’s hammer from his belt. This whole endeavor has been an exercise in putting Mjølnir down in a safe place while he does what needs to be done. He lowers it now to the marble floor one last time, miserable, wishing he could keep it. Wishing he still felt worthy.

Frigga steps away, tilts her head—in the direction of _the next dimension?_ Steve wonders somewhat crazily—and he activates the wristband.

~tbc~


	5. Chapter 5

_Soul._

He makes it to the top of the mountain just in time to see Clint and Nat go over the edge. When he sees who’s left, he vomits everything he ate that morning onto the ground.

“Steven. Son of Sar—”

“Shut up,” he heaves, hands braced on his knees, “you self-righteous asshole.”

He’d known. Of course he’d known; he’d questioned Clint very thoroughly about what he could expect once he reached the peak. But knowing and seeing—smelling that fetid odor that clung wherever the bastard went—are not the same.

“Ah, Steven.” The thing that was the Red Skull studies him. “Fate, it seems, plays tricks on us all.”

Steve’s enhanced senses catalogue the struggle on the cliff’s face, the twang and warble of Nat’s rappelling wire as it catches on rock. But the hatred overwhelms, thick, cloying, as though he’s only just wrestled the plane away from Red Skull’s control. The itch to kill him, beat him out of an existence to which he has _no right—_

Steve takes a deep breath, full of clean, cold ice. Whatever Red Skull is now, it can’t hurt him. And he most likely can’t hurt it.

And he doesn't have time for any of this. “Enough. I’m here to return the stone.”

The Stonekeeper appears unperturbed, even amused. “It must pain you, Captain Rogers, not to get your way.”

Steve grits his teeth. He opens the case with shaking hands and sets it on the ground, fingers fanned above the gentle orange of the Soul Stone, then meets the Stonekeeper’s eyes. They are penetrating and soulless, just as he remembers, and they follow his hand down into the box. Inches from the gem, Steve stops. “A soul for a soul.”

“It cannot be done.”

Steve squints through the frigid wind. Cocks his head. 

From what he knows of the stones, what the team was able to cobble together during those five years of hell and what came after, Stonekeepers have a sworn duty to their assignments, no matter how they received their stone. Observing Strange, Steve had decided it was a sacred trust, but upon hearing Clint’s tale of the mountain top, he has revised it into a blood oath, and not always voluntary. Steve will bet his life on this: whatever else Red Skull has become, he will not risk the stone’s integrity. Should Steve hold that integrity hostage, the Stonekeeper will not _be able_ to allow the timeline to rupture in such a way.

“The time is near,” the Stonekeeper says, reaching a withered red hand toward him. “Return the stone and restore the balance.”

“Give me what I want,” Steve says methodically, ears pricked for the deteriorating scuffle below, “and you get your stone back.”

For the first time, hesitance shows on the Stonekeeper’s face.

It’s not an expression Steve was ever used to on the Red Skull; it looks doubly strange here under this eerie eclipse-light. “The stone’s existence in the timeline must be maintained.”

“Then meet my terms.”

“It was a lasting exchange—”

“Meet,” he repeats, leaden, “my terms.”

Suddenly the Stonekeeper’s face relaxes, an ugly sort of serene that Steve remembers from long, dark years of war, from atrocity after atrocity, from unshakable, fanatical faith. “You must choose the soul to be exchanged.”

“Don’t worry, I have,” he mutters. The fight below is getting desperate—surely it did not drag out this long?—and he feels the familiar sensation of the air collapsing around his hand. Early. The soul stone doesn’t physically leave the timeline until Clint takes it out of there. But this stone... This stone has always been different.

“Ah, but you have not.”

Suddenly his head is full of Tony. 

Tony crumpled against the wreckage, his face half burnt and his arm dead at his side. For an instant, the Red Skull’s rot is not what Steve smells, but blood and rust, burning all around, and ash. Ash everywhere. The pinnacle on Vormir dims, and all he sees are Tony’s wide, fading eyes, the ripple of his throat as he struggles to speak one last time.

Steve’s chest hurts, so badly he could be dying.

He shuts his eyes against it, but the images keep coming. Tony, on the porch with Morgan in his arms. Nat, smirking through the open window of the Corvette. Tony, yanking him free of debris, his other hand firing a repulsor at oncoming hordes. Nat, popping pink bubble gum. Tony, beneath him and raising his hands to protect his face. Nat, crying over a sandwich. Tony holding the shield as Steve slowly slides his arm through the strap. Nat gripping his hand. Tony, thin and starving, in his arms. Nat, barely breathing, in his arms. 

_Liar. Here to pick up a fossil. I got nothing for you. This is gonna work, Steve. You trust me?_ “Stop. Oh god, _stop.”_ He feels the timeline bending.

“If you do not choose, the balance will remain unfulfilled.” The Stonekeeper’s voice sounds gleeful. Vindictive. There is more left of this soul’s old host than Steve thought. 

But is it enough to rip a timeline apart?

Below, Clint gives a ragged cry, the worst Steve has ever heard, and he knows Natasha is falling.

A silky whisper in his head, as hideous as its speaker: _You could bring him back, Captain. Living. Whole. In an instant, you could have him again._

He can’t. Can he? This is not what he’s meant to do, not what’s meant to happen. He can’t leave her to death. He _can’t._ But how can he leave him, either?

“Can you not decide?”

High above, the sky opens up, and the light sways like reeds.

“Nat,” he hisses, pressing his hands to either side of his head. Pushing Tony out. Nat. Nat, Natasha. Natasha. Nat, Nat, Nat, _Nat—_

The air snaps shut around his hand. He plunges it into the box, closing his fingers around the stone.

.  
.  
.

A millennia passes.

An instant.

.  
.  
.

Above, the sky has gone dark. Steve shudders on the ice. Shakes and shakes, and tries to breathe. 

What has he done? What _hasn’t_ he done?

“Had to be Nat.” It jitters out between his teeth. “Had to be.”

The air on top of the peak has no answer, and the Stonekeeper is gone. Inside the box, the remaining stone looks dim and dusty despite its emerald glow.

Clint spoke of a pool, lying weightless between earth and the bruised sky above. A cool, clear moment of absolute peace before remembering. There’s nothing like that for Steve. He curls over onto the ground, forehead pressed to frigid rock, and weeps.

~tbc~


	6. Chapter 6

_(breathe…)_

He knows he can’t go back to her. The life stretching out before him there would be crueler than the hottest hell, waiting for SHIELD to crumble again, for Hydra to murder thousands again, for the Avengers to split and reform and split again. For half the world to die. Always second guessing himself: _Is this right? Or this? Does this choice inflict life or does it summon death?_ He knows himself: he would try and try, and always wonder if what he did fixed things or broke them further. Created better timelines, or worse. And that’s even assuming that his presence so far back doesn’t shred everything irreparably for the reality he falls into, change Strange’s single winking glimmer and doom that entire universe to oblivion.

He goes anyway.

Her house is modest and yellow. Flowering shrubs line the walk, tended just enough to stave off overgrowth, and potted plants frame a set of stairs that creak under his weight. The door has a pane of glass in the middle with a white curtain hung across it. He raps on the wooden frame and waits.

It should take an eternity. It takes only a moment.

There she is, within arm’s reach for the first time in a lifetime, staring at him with welling eyes, shaking her head again and again as though she can’t believe what she’s seeing. He knows the feeling.

“Peg.”

Holding her is like coming back to the home he grew up in, the place where he lived safe and sound and dreamed of the future. The perfume he remembers clings to her curls, sweet and fragrant, and her dress is soft under his hands where he rubs her back.

“You’re not you,” she says. It’s soft, almost conversational. She lifts her head from his chest and looks him shrewdly in the eye. “You’re different.”

Telling her why should have taken longer too, but it goes by in moments, until all that’s left is—

“I can’t stay.”

She nods. She looks perfect, the waves in her hair, the red of her dress, the squeeze of her fists at her sides. Tears slide down her cheeks. His own cheeks are well past wet.

She steps back and extends her hand. “Then dance with me.” The swallow clicks in her throat, but she smiles at him. “We had a date.”

~tbc~


	7. Chapter 7

_Time._

The air compresses. By the time Bruce vanishes from the roof, the stone that belongs here hovers above Steve’s palm, raised toward the woman in yellow robes.

The Ancient One takes one look at him and her eyes go tired. “You’ve just returned the Soul Stone.”

He’s returned them all, except this one. Around them, the Battle of New York rages, the alien howls, the screams of civilians. It all feels very distant.

Carefully, the Ancient One takes the Time Stone from Steve’s palm and guides it back into the Eye of Agamotto. One click, the spin of metal, and its fierce green light vanishes forever. 

For Steve’s ever, at least.

There’s no relief to feel. Only the dreadful weight bearing down upon him, heavier and heavier as the moments tick by. 

The Ancient One places her hand on Steve’s arm, light as rain, then squeezes. “You did what you must.”

“Why can I _feel_ it?” He knows now, despite his hopes, that the bending is not just the stone returning to its place, but the future veering off. The splintering, the wriggling of time into infinite newness like blood pulsing through brand new capillaries. He may have prevented the dark, twisted spindle from fragmenting away at the loss of a foundation stone, but that’s all. He wasn’t supposed to split time at all and yet he’s done it again and again, in every step and with every breath, and none of them really understood just how easy it would be. The tighter he tries to squeeze, the more it all gets away from him. 

“Because you hold the stones. Because one by one, you held all of them. Because somewhere in the multiverse, you are still holding them and you always will be.”

Tony held all the stones, too. The idea of him stuck in that instant for the rest of eternity, on his knees in the middle of Thanos’ mess with the fire of six searing through his body, brings Steve to his knees. 

She drops with him, kneeling on the rooftop.

“Please.” Steve’s eyes hurt from all the crying he’s done. In the space of five hours, he’s lived a thousand years. “Please.”

“What are you asking me?”

He doesn’t know the words. Just that he wants it, that for the first time he’s allowing himself to want it, at its most impossible. So much has split already.

She touches the Eye, and then his forehead, gives him the softest push and he sees—

Worlds. 

Ages.

Universes.

He sees Tonys, and he sees Steves. Fighting each other. Killing each other. Marrying. Marrying each other. They are both women, then they are man and woman, then they are neither. He is small and frail, Tony is young and innocent. They are children. They _have_ children. He sees rings, blood, rage, wreckage, love, sex, obsession, indifference, and everywhere, in every single universe, he sees the same overwhelming, indescribable need.

“In most worlds, you and he are meant to be together.”

It’s the answer to a question he’d had no idea he’d been asking, shouting with raw lungs from the highest, coldest rooftop into the bleakest void. It’s cool water down a parched throat. It’s acid across his heart. Steve breaks, folds forward onto his hands. 

She catches him.

“It’s when you are not side by side that things go terribly wrong,” she murmurs, giving him a small, chastising shake.

In that moment, he knows exactly what he wants, and for the first time, despite all the potential futures, all the ways it could go wrong, he believes he can have it. He stares into her eyes and forms it in his head. Senses her listening.

 _Please. Please. Not that world, the world I came from. There he had a family. A daughter. There, he was complete. He didn’t need me. Never take that from him, from them. But some, some other world, some other mirror, with him, with_ that _him and with a better me… maybe…_

“You exist upon your plane even now,” she says, “and you cannot ever truly leave it.” 

The words thud home. He sways on the brink of a drop far higher than any cliff on Vormir. 

She goes on. “In that timeline, he cannot change what he is meant to do.” 

Or how he is meant to die. If that alters, the world Steve kneels in at this moment will fall. It barely survived as it is. The air has not warped yet, the timeline remains unsplit. There is only one way through the eye of Thanos’ needle, and Tony is their keenest thread. 

Her fingers slide over the Eye, thoughtful. “But perhaps your plane may bend.”

She traces a trembling golden thread across the air, and Steve can’t even hear the battle anymore. He feels this thread like a heartbeat, pulsing out pockets of silence. From the tip of her finger, a delicate silver tendril snakes off, twining gently around its mother plait. It looks so thin. So fragile.

She touches his hand. _Whatever your ultimate fates, there is no reality in existence where you are_ meant _to be apart. For you, I think the universe will listen. For you, and for him._

“The moment you want.” The words do not question, but her eyes do nothing else. “Choose.”

He takes a breath of New York air, full of brimstone and death, and whispers it to her.

~tbc~


	8. Chapter 8

(“I need him.”)

.  
.  
.

What Steve wanted with Peggy was peace. A world where they didn’t have to fight, where they could both sit by and be each other’s, and live.

What he wants with Tony is a very different animal.

With Peg, the war always, always got in the way, splintered him like a riven timeline. It was always _after_ the war, when the war was _over,_ then his real life could begin. He was a soldier, or he was a person. He could never do both, be both, at the same moment. 

But he has fought the war and loved Tony Stark all at once, as the same person, and the two of himself never walked side by side; they were a single, thickly braided strand. Fighting Tony—with, against, alongside, and for—was loving Tony, and loving Tony was the height of battle, all of Steve’s blood singing, his vision sharp and his heart racing fierce and strong, and he doesn’t _love_ war, but he loves how he feels when he fights it at Tony’s side. 

He used to be two men: the man who longed not to have died so that he could be with her, and the man who longs for the one who knows what it means to die. He could wish for peace. A porch to sit on with lemonade in iced glasses, no more nemeses to creep up or stride in or explode out of the darkness. 

But that person, the Steve Rogers who could live that life, ignore the rest and be happy with that, is long dead.

.  
.  
.

(As the song ends, he whispers coordinates into Peggy’s ear, where to find the version of him who can still grow with her, who wants everything she wants, and the timeline splinters again.) 

.  
.  
.

What Steve wants with her, he can’t have, because of who he is and who she is. Maybe once, after Erskine but before the serum, a tangential path waited quietly, holding its breath by his side, the world ready to bend like reeds, and had he just reached out and caught hold—

But then things changed. He changed. Maybe, he thinks, distantly amused, a line shot off anyway where he and Peggy Carter lived together and loved each other and found what they were looking for.

.  
.  
.

(He tells her about James Buchanan Barnes. The timeline splinters.)

.  
.  
.

He no longer wants to fight for a life he can keep. Now he is fighting—maybe for five years, maybe for an eternity—for a life to give away, to throw down in place of Tony Stark’s. To make sure Tony lives again, too.

What he wanted was an end to the war. He knows now that wars never end; they only change. His enhanced body and his sturdier blood know their purpose: his muscles burn for the battle the old him could never have fought, the mitigation of inevitable damage as far as he is able. Why Tony was never able to actually _leave_ the business they were both in.

It’s buried in Steve’s bones.

.  
.  
.

(Steve takes the gauntlet up and dies in agony. Tony is already dead.)

.

(Steve never takes the serum, never meets Peggy, never meets Howard. He meets Tony, though, a man out of time with rakish graying hair, on a barstool one night amidst crying and cheering as the war comes to a close.)

.

(Steve takes the serum, takes hold of Europe, takes over the world. He takes a lover who is damaged, chilling, without empathy. Without a heart. Tony is as genius as he is beautiful, and never shuts his mouth, and burns the world to ashes at Steve’s side.)

.

(Steve takes a squalling baby from Howard’s hands and smiles down into a teary face, and loves him instantly.)

.  
.  
.

He could erase it, all his sins. Go back to before and strike out anew. But he has already acted. He has already failed a thousand times, and like the Ancient One said, somewhere he is still failing for all eternity. Tony’s blood is on his hands, past, present, and future, not the slow, red blood that curled down Tony’s lip as their fistfight in the icelands raged on, or the clotted, charred blood that caked the side of Tony’s face in the aftermath of Thanos’ defeat. The blood Steve bears is the blood from Tony’s soul, and the wound is that of a secret he should never have kept.

A truth he didn’t know how to face.

It feels dishonest—it feels _wrong_ —to hide from it.

.  
.  
.

(The Ancient One smiles at him before she sends him on. Smiles, and touches his chin. “And he always needs you.”)

.  
.  
.

The earth spins and spins. A trillion moments happen at once.

~tbc~


	9. Chapter 9

Somewhere in Wakanda, a version of him is standing at a window, sick to his soul, putting his oldest friend to sleep and trying to find a thread of hope that is frayed, hanging out of reach.

Now, here, Steve follows a different thread, right up to the massive glass and metal door.

He knocks on the glass. The compound is quiet, birds chirping in the tree line, and if he listens, he can hear the water lapping at the pebbled shore of the inlet. The last time he saw this place, it was nothing but rubble. But that hasn’t happened yet. 

It’s strange knocking at a door not meant to be knocked upon.

After a long time, Tony throws the sliding mechanisms free and opens the door, staring at Steve as though he’s a ghost. His eyes climb Steve’s body, drag at his flesh. Steve can practically hear that incredible brain picking apart the differences, the years that shouldn’t be there wrought into Steve’s skin. Tony is younger, his hair less gray, but he looks far older than he ever has, future included. The injuries at his eye and brow are still fresh, the bruising dark and ugly, and Steve can see a sliver of the terror he saw as he raised his shield overhead, Tony’s usual light buried deep.

His beard is still ridiculously, perfectly kempt, and beneath it, Tony’s jaw clenches.

“Police, FRIDAY. Call them.”

FRIDAY doesn’t answer, but it’s not really an order at all, is it? Tony squints at Steve through the spring twilight, starts to speak, then stops. He comes closer, the scientist forever unable to resist impossibility when presented with it.

“What?” Tony waggles the flip phone in one hand. He has it. He’s holding it already, like it’s a part of him, a mere day after this world’s Steve sent it home. “Something else archaic you want to give me?”

“Just me,” Steve says, soft, drinking in the sight of him.

Tony opens his mouth, then closes it. He stares at Steve for a long, long time.

“Who _are_ you?” Tony hisses, half furious, half lost. Maybe he half knows.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. “For what I kept from you and how I did it. I thought...” There’s so much, and he’ll get to it, if Tony will let him, but there is one bottom line: “I didn’t want to cause you more pain.”

Tony’s eyes dart, cataloguing, piecing together, damn near scrying. God, Steve has missed this, missed him, the way they used to look at each other and the way the answers just unfolded themselves. He even misses how he and Tony used to fight it, as though it was something to be afraid of and not the greatest gift Steve’s ever known. And maybe this is worse, if he can’t fix this, if they can’t right this wrong, maybe it’s worse to have Tony again, but for the life of him, Steve can’t feel it.

“You’re not… you,” Tony says softly. He glances back over his shoulder into the compound—shining, sleek, whole—then looks Steve over again.

“No, and yes.”

“You’re different.”

The world holds its breath.

Tony pushes the door wider and steps back. He jerks his head once, his eyes darting inside. “Well?” 

It’s a stilted invite, and Steve will take it. God, he’ll take it, with gratitude. He steps inside. He unclips the quantum bracelet and— 

_Sees_ another Tony peel away from the one standing before him, transparent and frowning, the room, the compound, upstate New York rising into the ether like a photo negative lifting free. He sees his other self fade out. The world bends violently around them and somewhere in the center of the earth sounds a low, sonorous snap.

A hiss. Tony sways. He clutches Steve’s arms, stares into Steve’s face with mouth agape. He looks around them, then back to Steve. The words rush from him. “What just happened?” 

_What did I just see?_

Steve drops the bracelet to the ground and grips Tony’s arms in return. It’s the first time he has touched Tony since Tony died. It’s been lifetimes. The dam inside him is bursting, a wall of grief, joy, gratitude about to crash down. His eyes blur, but he smiles. “I have a lot to tell you.”

~tbc~


	10. Chapter 10

It’s a nice bench. Cedar-smell. Smooth wood. Above, an impossibly young Sam Wilson lifts his chin at Steve.

“You wanna tell me about her?”

Behind Sam, dappled light shimmers out of place across a tree trunk, and Steve smiles.

“No. No, I don’t think I will.”

This shield has seen more than it ever should have, and still not nearly enough. Reinforced now, lined with magnetized vibranium and sealed by nanites that keep the ion shell ever moving, the slow crawl of molecules to better absorb the most catastrophic of impacts. 

He hands it to Sam with pride.

He promised himself he would remember this moment perfectly. But just being with this Sam again, faced with his smile and cocooned in his easy affection… everything blurs into a loose, cozy ball in Steve’s chest. 

Just Sam—the first Sam—one more time.

After a while, Sam makes way, and Buck sits down on the bench beside him. He goes very still, then wraps the arm Shuri made him tight and warm around Steve’s shoulders. Steve closes his eyes and leans. It’s been… years.

“Shield’s different,” Bucky offers, watching Sam over Steve’s shoulder as he shows the shield to Bruce. “Finally started collecting that scrap metal, huh?”

There’s something in his voice. Steve twists a hand into the end of Bucky’s jacket and gives it a yank. 

“What happened to you?” Bucky murmurs.

“I lived,” Steve says, and feels his oldest friend smile into his hair.

“Don’t tell them?” Steve whispers when they finally pull apart.

Bucky ruffles his hair with his flesh-and-blood hand. “Tell who what? I don’t know nothin’.”

Time passes. Eventually, too much time, and Bucky leaves in the direction Sam went. Steve stands, stretching old bones, and moves away from the water into the shade of the trees, watching his friends—family—walk out of his life again.

The shade twists, then utters a loud sigh.

“Stop,” Steve murmurs. “They come back here, you’re going to give them a complex.” 

Beside him, the tree trunk shimmers, a trillion infinitesimal mirrors reflecting light and just barely shaping the frame of the man standing there. “Bruce would leap straight through the canopy, though. Come on, admit it, you’d pay to see that.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

A sound like tinkling chimes: Tony removes his helmet, the microscopic nanites sliding away at his nape. The rest of the suit half-materializes in gentle gray-brown, blending with the tree trunks. He closes his eyes and draws a deep breath of piney air. “Wow. I sure know how to pick ‘em, huh?”

“Rhodey picked this place, actually. Stuffed you in the car and dragged you kicking and screaming down that road until you marched into the forest just to get away from him.”

Tony makes a judgmental noise, but his brow is smooth, as smooth as it can be these days, and his gaze moves unhurriedly over the trees, the leaf-littered ground, the water behind them.

There will be no bending of air today. A good four decades of Stark science and travel around the cosmos has shielded them from this flow; Tony’s newest armor and the unassuming band round Steve’s left wrist keep them well apart where they can’t do any notable damage. Steve smiles, then pauses and looks toward the wreck of the complex again. Remembers another event just weeks ago in this timeline, in a very different forest under a very different pall. He remembers a small voice asking for more ketchup on her fries. 

“Do you want to see her? Them.” _We could go back._

Tony doesn’t say anything for a long time, but Steve can feel the whole of him standing there, cloaked and breathing. Finally, he shrugs. “They aren’t mine.”

 _They are._ Steve gazes at his husband, at the gray hair, the deep laugh-lines at the corners of squinting brown eyes and the edges of that ever-smirking mouth. At the hands that craft wonders. The incomparable, beautiful mind. _All of this is yours, and in every mirror, you are mine in all the ways that matter._

Tony reaches absently, eyes still on the rubble, his hand settling just to the left of Steve’s sternum. It’s habit, years ingrained: underneath Steve’s shirt is the furrowed scar where their Thanos stabbed Steve through the heart, cut him nearly in two and killed him in seconds.

And then flung his bleeding body at Tony’s feet, a gauntlet slapped down in victory.

Steve rubs Tony’s hand, the same one that Tony shoved into a gauntlet of his own moments later and snapped Steve alive again.

It didn’t turn out for Tony the way it had in this timeline. His Tony had full-fledged Extremis because Steve begged him, pleaded with him, damn near forced it upon him.

His Tony burned Thanos to cinders.

Steven Grant Rogers is one hundred and eighty-five years old, Anthony Edward Stark well into his one-twenties, and all Steve wants is to pull his soulmate close, peel apart their layers and give him everything he could possibly want. 

“I love you.”

Tony looks at him in surprise and not a little worry. It’s been years since they last argued about this timeline’s Tony, the one who died, the one Steve loved with all of his substantially broken being; years since Steve last had to convince his husband that the Tony he gave up his life for was not the one he left behind in a grave, but the one he found again, the one he loved well, and better, enough to heal what had broken between them, to slow down and painstakingly lance the infection until the blood flowed bright and clean again. To do what needed to be done, not what was efficient or painless. 

“And I love you,” Tony says. His voice is gravelly, and Steve could drown in it, just the same as he could when they were young.

~tbc~


	11. Chapter 11

_(…and live.)_

The wind tosses the upper boughs of the oak. To the left, the land stretches away, rich and golden, the barn slumping comfortably, the picnic table at the edge of the field with the forest beyond.

“Dinner, boys,” comes a yell from inside, perking her ears. “Right now, or no pie for dessert!”

She huffs a laugh and listens to feet clattering down the stairs. From the eaves, the old windchime bongs lowly. She smooths her shirt. Takes a deep breath, and knocks on the screen’s rain-weathered frame.

Clint opens the door in a plaid shirt and the jeans with the back pockets ripped off. She hears it when he stops breathing.

“Hey.” She smiles. Clears her throat, waves a hand she didn’t mean to wave. “Got enough for one more?”

His throat works. “Tasha?”

He’s perfect. Just like she remembers. “Yeah, Clint. He did it.”

He’s through the door before she can move, wrapped around her and hoisting her off the ground, raw sobs in her ears and tears wetting her neck. They lose their balance and thump down to the ground in a tangle of limbs, dried grass pricking her arms and tickling her nape, the sweet smells of hay and home working themselves deep inside again.

“Tasha,” is all he can seem to say. “Tasha.”

Voices, running feet, then arms, arms and faces and hair everywhere, and dinner and pie are utterly forgotten by the entire Barton clan, but that’s okay.

That’s okay.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> **This is one of my three-fic set after every Marvel movie that feeds the Stony lovefest.**
> 
> I have an idea for the second fic, but I want to open the third one up to reader choice. **Let me know what in this universe you'd like to see more of! Timestamps? Future fic? Alternate timelines?**


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